Emotional reactions to scandals: When does moral character make a difference?

A scandal can evoke public outrage when it is widely publicized and involves an individual who is perceived to have a high level of cultural representativeness. Two experiments showed that when the scandalous target's moral character was highlighted, emotional responses towards the target were least negative when the scandal was widely circulated and when the target was seen as a representative of his culture. These results suggest that when a cultural symbol is implicated in a widely‐circulated scandal, the negative emotions directed towards the scandalous individual can be alleviated when the public remains confident in his or her commitment to morality.     

Awakening: Career Opportunities After the Storm

Immediately following natural disasters, basic needs are provided; however, the long‐term needs of individuals are neglected. The narrative approach (Brott, 2001; Cochran, 1997) to career counseling is offered as a method to assist survivors of natural disasters to tell their story and create new meaning related to their career paths.     

Embodied Cultural Cognition: Situating the Study of Embodied Cognition in Socio‐Cultural Contexts

Embodiment research has demonstrated that cognition is grounded in bodily interactions with the environment and that abstract concepts are tied to the body’s sensory and motor systems. Building upon this embodiment perspective and advancing our understanding, we discuss the extension of embodied cultural cognition. We propose that some associations between bodily experiences and abstract concepts are not randomly formed; rather, the development of such associations is situated in a socio‐cultural context, informed by cultural imperatives, values, and habits. We draw evidence supporting this view of embodied cultural cognition in body–mind linkages manifested in construal of emotions, time perception, person perception, social power, and moral reasoning. To further extend this research avenue that synthesizes the studies of embodied cognition and culture, we also suggest potential future research directions inspired by this view. This embodied cultural cognition account is useful in understanding and organizing accumulating discoveries of cultural variations in embodiments; it also highlights the social situatedness of embodied cognition and is, therefore, highly compatible with theorizing and research in social and cultural psychology.     

The role of encoding strategies in the verbal memory performance in patients with schizophrenia

Background. Verbal learning and memory is often compromised in patients with schizophrenia who prefer encoding words in order of their presentation (serial clustering) rather than using semantic categories (semantic clustering). Method. One hundred and four in‐patients with schizophrenia were assessed twice with the California Verbal Learning Test. Results. Patients showed significantly less semantic than serial clustering at both assessment times. Usage of encoding strategies were not stable over time. An increase in semantic clustering improved recall and recognition performance. Conclusions. Patients with schizophrenia should be taught to use the more effective encoding strategy of semantic clustering in order to improve their memory performance.     

Resilience: A Disability Studies and Community Psychology Approach

This paper contests traditional psychological understandings of resilience through reference to a research project exploring resilience in the lives of disabled people. The paper briefly historically locates individualistic accounts of resilience (which have often been unhelpful in the lives of disabled people) and then moves into more recent social constructionist theories of this phenomenon. This latter perspective necessarily locates resilience in a network of resources including material resources, relationships, identity, bodies and minds, power and control, community participation, community cohesion and social justice. We argue that the recognition of resilience as a relational product is important and in tune with attempts to make psychology less an individualistic encounter and more a community intervention. However, disabled people, their politics and the development of critical disability studies, contest and challenge normative ideas of what it means to live with a resilient network of resources. In this sense disability offers new and exciting ways of addressing resilience.     

Event-based prospective memory for poorly attended events

In the most frequently used paradigm for studying event-based prospective memory (PM, Einstein & McDaniel, 1990), participants perform an ongoing task and are asked to perform an additional task when a particular stimulus (the PM cue) is presented. In this study three experiments examined how PM performance depends on stimulus selection, which is a major process involved in executive task control according to current theorizing. Participants made semantic judgments about a target word accompanied by two nontargets (distracters). The target was indicated by its spatial position (Experiment 1) or color (Experiment 2). The findings indicated that PM performance was much poorer when the PM cue was irrelevant to the ongoing task, in spite of the fact that nontargets were processed semantically as shown in Experiment 3.     

Effects of orthographic consistency, frequency, and letter knowledge on children's vowel spelling development

This study investigated children's sensitivity to spelling consistency, and lexical and sublexical (rime) frequency, and their use of explicitly learned canonical vowel graphemes in the early stages of learning to spell. Vowel spellings produced by 78 British children at the end of reception year (mean age 5 years, 7 months) and 6 months later in mid-Year 1 were assessed. Regression analyses revealed that, at both test times, knowledge of sound-letter correspondences influenced spelling performance; however, unconditional consistency of vowel spellings affected children's spelling most strongly, over and above additional effects of word and rime frequency and the complexity of the target vowel grapheme. The effect of conditional consistency of vowel spellings given coda contexts was not significant. Thus, young children are sensitive to various statistical properties of the orthography from the earliest phases of spelling development and, in particular, to the unconditional consistency of the vowel spelling pattern.     

Konzeptualisierung in inkrementell-integrativer Sprachverarbeitung

Conceptualization in incremental-integrative\hb language processing Summary. Language is a versatile instrument in co-operatively solving a construction task. In order to understand instructions given during such a task, objects have to be identified and the type of action to be performed has to be determined. The experiments presented show that the way in which objects and actions are conceptualized depends on the linguistic and the non-linguistic, visually available context. Both kinds of information are processed incrementally in an integrative way. The impact of relevant factors, such as the specificity of verbs and object namings, object properties such as color, size, location and the dynamically determined class to which the object belongs was studied. Conclusions for models of language understanding and language production are drawn and requirements for a grammatical formalism suitable for incremental and integrative processing are formulated. Zusammenfassung. Sprache ist ein wichtiges Instrument bei der kooperativen Lösung einer Konstruktionsaufgabe. Zum Verstehen von Handlungsanweisungen im Rahmen dieser Aufgabe müssen Objekte identifiziert und die Art der Handlung erkannt werden. Es werden empirische Untersuchungen vorgestellt, die zeigen, daß die Konzeptualisierung der Objekte und Handlungen vom sprachlichen und nichtsprachlichen, visuell verfügbaren Kontext abhängt. Beide Arten von Kontextinformation werden inkrementell und integrativ verarbeitet. Dazu wurde der Einfluß einzelner Faktoren wie die Spezifität von Verben und Objektbezeichnungen, Objekteigenschaften wie Farbe, Größe und Position sowie die dynamisch zugewiesene Objektklasse und die Wortstellung der benutzten Sprache untersucht. Es werden Folgerungen für die Modellierung von beiden Richtungen der Sprachverarbeitung, Rezeption und Produktion, gezogen und Anforderungen an einen Grammatikformalismus zur inkrementell-integrativen Satzverarbeitung dargestellt.     

Strategies to cope with negative social identity: predictions by social identity theory and relative deprivation theory

Predictions by social identity theory (SIT) and relative deprivation theory (RDT) concerning preferences for strategies to cope with a negative in-group status position were tested. The focus of the present research was a comparison of the theories regarding their differential patterns of prediction. For this purpose, a natural sample within a specific historical situation was investigated: East Germans after the German unification. First, the predictive power of SIT and RDT variables was tested separately. In a second step, a possible integration of the theories was addressed. Combining the SIT variables and RDT variables led to an integrated model indicating a differential pattern of prediction for intergroup strategies. The RDT components explained the collective responses, whereas SIT constructs were related to individual strategies.